Mind the Gap!

I love the way the Brits express themselves. Mind the Gap… the most important thing you should be thinking about when you are getting on or off the Tube (the subway)! This sign couldn’t be more clear, concise, or evocative. Just three words and suddenly you are focused. Lose track of this one red lettered admonition and you will be in a world of hurt!

The gap I refer to this morning is less dangerous. It is the gap in blog entries… and here is me minding it. I won’t pretend that there has been a deafening hue and cry about an absence of blog entries, but I can report hearing a couple of quiet whimpers, one pointed jab-in-the-ribs email from a friend and several off color texts from close acquaintances: all gesturing at the empty space in this blog-a-thon between June and today.

I have been telling them then what I am about to tell you now. Hey, I’ve been busy! I’m in the final throes of bringing forth another book into the world.

This gives you a hint as to why you should keep your distance from me when I am writing. Mostly I love the work but like many other writers, I sometimes also hate it too, especially around publication time. Imagine an epoch of tedium and embarrassment, a long drawn out gong show. Imagine spending every waking hour being picked over by the supercilious comma and spelling police. One day followed by another, then another laboring at corrections only to clear the underbrush to reveal dangling participles smelling like thrice worn running socks, hanging out there in what you thought was a literary breeze. That’s what publishing feels like. And while standing trial for rotten punctuation, you are being sued for your nonsensical diction and grammar, well, who the hell who wants to write? Who wants to create more cannon fodder for those-who-must-be-obeyed?

Today’s good news is comma police are retiring back to the barracks and those dangling participles are washed, folded, and tucked in a drawer, out of sight. With some luck, the book will be out by late October and you, lucky reader, will be able to get your copy (electronic and printed formats) soon thereafter. The Mingus Parchment is a business book about being an entrepreneur in an unusual land. It is about a character who learns how to fend for himself, discovers that “life is curly”, and how to “keep his eye on the meatball”. It is an adventure story set in a fantasy world with strange and interesting characters who grow and learn about entrepreneurship and finally, as we discover in the end, reach a place of real accomplishment and well, you’ll have to read the book to get what I am talking about.

The gap to be minded in The Mingus Parchment is the unpredictable nature of things – things all of us think ought to be predictable but are not, and how entrepreneurship can become a compendium of experiences that teaches us how to navigate surprise, variability, and life’s general iffy-ness.

This announcement appears in my blog because completing and publishing The Mingus Parchment is a fulfillment of another step in my quest to teach through stories. In this case, The Mingus Parchment is for not only people who might be entrepreneurs, but also children and young adults, because make no mistake, knowing how to fend for yourself (entrepreneurship by another name) is a very valuable life skill no matter which path one chooses to take.

So do Mind the Gap! Stay tuned for more sort-of regular blog entries and know that The Mingus Parchment is on its way to the Amazon showroom near you!

And now that I’ve written this entry, it’s off to the comma police to see if I am free to go or not.